EDEN (42 page)

Cody stared at the deck as every emotion he had ever felt spilled from his body and drained away from him. Memories flashed through his mind: Bethany falling oddly silent after their capture and imprisonment by Sawyer’s men, her concern at Hank’s possible betrayal.

As soon as she saw Ben she would have known that she must protect her little brother, just as Cody so needed to protect Maria from the brutal world that now surrounded them. But here, at the very last and most dangerous hurdle, Bethany had failed him.

‘Why?’ he whispered, barely able to speak. ‘You could have said something to me. Why?’

Bethany’s face was a tear-stained visage of regret and self-loathing.

‘I had to make sure Ben was okay first,’ she gasped between sobs, her words coming in staccato bursts punctuated by sharp intakes of breath. ‘But the prisoners escaped and we got cut off and there was no time for us to reach Maria. There was nothing that I could do.’

Cody stared at her in silence for a long moment. He had fled the building believing Maria to be safe, when in fact in his haste he had abandoned her to her fate yet again. If he had only waited. Searing regret churned like poison through his veins.

‘Where did you last see her?’

Bethany managed to choke out the last few words.

‘The State House. I think Sawyer put her under guard in one of the ground floor rooms.’

Cody stared down at the deck rolling around them. ‘How long have we been at sea?’

‘Twenty minutes, maybe a little more.’

Cody shifted position against the mainmast and looked away from her. ‘I’m glad you found your brother.’

He let the silence build in the darkness.

‘I had no choice,’ Bethany said. ‘You would have done the same.’

Cody drew back against the mast, away from the light. ‘We all had a choice.’

‘You would have done the same,’ Bethany repeated.

‘I doubt that,’ came another voice from nearby.

Seth stood at the entrance to the hold, a journal of some kind in his hands and delight on his face. He chuckled as he leafed through the pages, his features demonic in the dim light.

‘It seems dear old Jake was keeping a journal about all of you,’ Seth said. ‘He recorded every little thing that you did, right up until you went ashore.’

Cody stared at the journal. ‘What for?’

‘Who the hell knows?’ Seth chortled. ‘But he sure as hell didn’t get his sums right, Mister Ryan. It says here that Bethany Rogers was a steadfast and loyal member of the team who could be relied upon and represented the voice of reason.’ Seth looked up at her. ‘A little off the mark now, don’t you think, Miss Rogers?’

‘Get out of here,’ Cody uttered.

‘What?’ Seth pleaded. ‘You don’t want to hear what he wrote about you, Cody?’

‘I’m amazed you can read at all,’ Bethany said.

Seth flipped through a few pages and stopped at one. ‘Ah, listen to this: Doctor Ryan is the one member of the team who seems out of his depth. I suspect that he is more at home in a laboratory surrounding, as his nervous disposition and thinly veiled anxiety make his assignment here an unusual choice, especially for a family man.’ Seth grinned at Cody. ‘But we all know why now don’t we, Doctor Ryan? Sawyer told us about your brother. Tragic.’

Seth snapped the pages of the journal closed and stepped down into the hold until he stood over Cody.

‘Not the kind of family man that Jake had in mind, eh?’ Seth challenged.

‘Because you’re an icon of virtue, right?’ Bethany spat.

Cody kept his head turned away from her, unable any longer to bear the sound of her voice. Bethany stood in silence for a long moment and then the hatch above them was hauled back. The light from the deck above spilled into the hold as Cody saw Hank and Sawyer glaring down at him.

‘You lied!’ Sawyer screamed, pointing at Bethany. ‘The coordinates point to nothing but empty ocean!’

Cody looked across at Bethany as it all became clear. She had shared the coordinates with Sawyer in order to get away from Boston. He saw the flare of guilt in her eyes as she averted them from his.

Sawyer’s voice reached him from the hatch above. ‘Where are the coordinates?! Where’s your diary?’

Cody felt a curious warmth spread through his body, hot rather than satisfying as he looked up at Sawyer and saw the tremendous rage etched into the psychopath’s features. In an instant Cody realised why: Sawyer had just lost everything too. He had lost his fortress, his control, his men and his chances of survival, not to mention his status.

Cody’s face twisted of its own accord into a brittle smile.

Sawyer screamed something unintelligible and leaped down into the hold. He landed with a deep thud alongside Cody, the broad sabre he kept at his side shimmering in the light as he drew it and placed it alongside Cody’s throat.

‘Tell me the real coordinates, now!’

Cody felt the cold steel touch his skin, felt his own pulse threading its way past the blade. The smile spread further across his features and he began to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. Mirth wracked his body as he laughed out loud, his own booming chuckles echoing through his mind as he felt himself let go of the grief, of the regret, of the unspeakable fear for Maria that scalded through his veins.

Sawyer stood back from him and looked up at Hank. The captain said nothing, watching as Cody’s macabre delight finally subsided. Sawyer turned and the blade flashed up to Bethany’s face. Sawyer caught the weapon a bare inch from her neck, his eyes fixed on Cody.

‘The coordinates,’ he snarled.

Cody did not look at Bethany as he spoke.

‘She just killed my little girl,’ he managed to rasp, his throat dry. ‘I don’t care what you do to her. I don’t care what any of you do any more. I hope to hell that you sail this ship into a hurricane and spend your last moments listening to each other drowning and being eaten alive by sharks.’

Bethany flinched visibly at his words. Sawyer snarled and raised the sabre high to bring it down upon Bethany. The sound of a pistol being cocked caused him to hesitate and look up at Hank. The captain aimed the pistol at Sawyer and shook his head.

‘Not just charts in that compartment, Sawyer,’ he snarled. ‘Bethany, get out of the hold.’

Bethany cast one last look at Cody and then turned and fled. Cody looked at Sawyer, who stared down at him in a paralysis of volatile emotions, rage alternating with disbelief for space on his features.

‘I’ll get it out of you, Ryan,’ he spat.

‘Turn the ship around,’ Cody replied, ‘and you’ll get what you want.’

The captain watched Cody for what felt like an eternity before he spoke.

‘We can’t go back now and there’s no longer any good reason to. By nightfall we’ll be well clear of Boston.’

‘Then throw me over the side!’ Cody yelled. ‘Let me go back!’

Sawyer moved to stand over him, the demonic grin plastered across his face.

‘Not a chance, my young friend,’ he chortled. ‘You’re staying right there, just for the goddamned hell of it. Unless you tell us where Eden really is.’

‘I don’t know!’ Cody raged. ‘Those were the coordinates I wrote down, the ones sent to Alert! I don’t know why they’re in the goddamned ocean and I don’t care anymore! Just cut me loose and let me go back to Boston!’

Sawyer’s expression slipped into despair as he realised that Cody was telling the truth.

‘If I did all of this for nothing,’ he growled, ‘then so did you.’

Sawyer stood up and turned his back on Cody.

Cody squirmed against the bonds tying him to the mainmast. Sawyer chuckled in delight as he climbed the steps out of the hold. Cody looked up and saw Hank staring down at him. There was no pity on the captain’s features. His voice carried down to Cody softly as the crew closed the hatch.

‘She’s gone, Cody,’ he said.

Cody did not reply. He kept his gaze fixed upon the captain’s until the hatch slammed shut above him and only the weak light from the lantern illuminated his world.

Cody sat alone in the darkness for several minutes as he stared blindly into the shadows. Maria’s image hovered in his mind’s eye, watching him in silence. But for the first time in all of the long months that he had sought her there was no longer any emotion. He laughed, his lonely chuckles echoing through the hold. He had been a fool, such a fool to think that he or Maria could survive in this horrible world, a world stalked by men who were no longer men at all. It would have been better if she had died in the storm, if he had died, or even if his deranged brother had killed them all when he’d had the chance all those months before. Maybe that was what had driven Peter Ryan to the heartless excesses he had achieved, to threaten the weak and the helpless. Maybe the old guy in the cage at the state house had been right: that there was just no sense in caring anymore, because there was nothing left to care for.

He felt as though he had been bled by medieval hardship of his ability to feel anything.

In the darkness he felt the fragments of his remaining compassion and love slip away like phantoms into the night. The pressure on his chest lifted, the seething grief and overpowering helplessness faded like fluke winds as the gentle rolling of the Phoenix through the rough seas outside rocked him in a lullaby.

For a moment his mind remained empty of thought and then he realised that he finally understood. After all these years, he finally realised how it was that people like Sawyer and Hank could be the way that they were. Something inside, something powerful and ancient and harboured by all men had simply vanished, disappeared, become extinct. Their empathy, their tendency to rage when witness to injustice and suffering had simply been switched off. No concerns, no fears, no consequences to their actions.

Life was simply a series of events, flowing one after the other, and as each passed and another presented itself so they forged ahead, uncaring of each other and of themselves.

Cody smiled in the brutal shadows. It did not require rage. It did not require injustice. It did not require loss or pain or hatred. It required nothing, the loss of all that it was to be human and humane. Cody felt a cold ball form somewhere deep inside him.

There was really only one thing left to fight for.

Cody turned his head and saw in the faint light shards of the barrel that had shattered when he had last been in the hold, fighting for his life with Denton. They were scattered near the main mast. Cody shuffled around the mast and used his boot to pin a splinter and drag it across the deck. He then kicked it backwards with his heel into the mast behind him.

He grabbed it in his fingers and turned it, began to work the edge against the rope binding his wrists. He knew that the ropes would have been tied well but he diligently kept the edge of the wood rubbing against them. There was no rush. There was nothing to fear.

There was nothing to care for any longer.

It took twenty minutes, but he felt the rope part and the pressure on his wrists ease as the splinter frayed and then separated the rope. Another five minutes of working his wrists and easing them between the ropes and he finally yanked them free as the cords fell away.

Cody rubbed his sore wrists and looked quietly about the hold, his mind clear and devoid of hubris or doubt. He saw the fragments of the shattered barrel cast into the corner of the hold nearby. A belaying pin in its mount on the wall of the hold. The ropes he had just freed himself from.

The lantern, flickering nearby under the weak power from its battery.

Cody walked across to the barrel and gathered the pieces of wood, then stacked them in the centre of the hold. He turned to the ropes and used wood splinters to shred the rope into fine fibres that he bundled up into a ball and set beside the stack of wood.

He turned and walked across to the lantern and lifted it off the hull. He knelt back down alongside the ball of rope fibres and took off his belt and shirt. Then, carefully, he turned the lantern upside down and plucked the small battery from its base. The hold was plunged into near total darkness but for a sliver of light peeking through gaps in the hatch above him.

Working by touch alone, Cody used the metal edge of the lantern to slice off the battery’s plastic sleeve on the negative side, careful to leave half of the sleeve remaining. A strip of paper insulator covered the cap of the battery beneath the sleeve.

He put the battery in his lap, and then reached into the base of the lantern. He fumbled for a few seconds before he felt a wire. Cody yanked the wire out and then used the lantern’s metal base to strip the wire back to the copper.

Cody picked up the stripped battery and slipped one end of the wire under the insulator. Then he grabbed a small piece of the shredded rope fibres and wrapped them around the other end of the wire before pressing them against the battery’s negative contact.

The battery immediately sent current flowing through the thin wire and Cody saw it glow red hot in the darkness. The small bundle of fibres smouldered with smoke moments later as he touched the hot copper to them. Cody blew gently on the fibres and saw bright embers flare as they burned, and then a flickering flame burst into life within the bundle.

Cody lowered the burning kindling into the stack of wood, then grabbed his discarded shirt and tore off one sleeve. Slowly, he lowered the sleeve into the flames. Steam puffed off the shirt as the dampness boiled off, and then it caught with writhing flames that began to coil their way slowly up the sleeve.

Cody held onto the shirt for as long as he could bear and then draped it across the inside of the stack of wood. Burning from within, the wood began to char as a flickering red light filled the hold and thick smoke boiled upward toward the hatch.

He stood back as the fire began to crackle and spit, then crouched down as the smoke began to fill the hold. He wrapped the remaining strips of shirt around his face, and gripped the belaying pin in his fist as he watched the flames writhe up toward the hatch.

***

Hank stood in the wheelhouse and watched squalls of rain spilling from the turbulent sky above. The sun was peeking through ethereal veils of falling rain, the pale orb hovering motionless as translucent clouds scudded before it.